The 27’s – Mia Zapata 1965 - 1993

Part 27 in a series on “The 27’s” – notable musicians who have passed away in their 27th year.

Mia Zapata was the lead singer for the Seattle punk band The Gits. She was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, where she learned to sing and play guitar. Her early influences were singers Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Jimmy Reed, Ray Charles, Hank Williams and Sam Cooke. She was on the forefront of the “foxcore” trend in the early 90’s, loud and aggressive female fronted groups.

While attending Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, she co-founded the band, The Gits, and by 1989 the band had relocated to Seattle to take advantage of the emerging music scene there. In the early 90’s The Gits released a number of singles on indie labels and in 1992 their first album, “Frenching the Bully” was released. The reviews were good and 1993 found the band working on a follow-up album.

On the morning of July 7, 1993, around 2:00 a.m., Zapata was brutally murdered. The Seattle Times gave this timeline leading up to her death:

Mia got out of bed around 11 a.m. on July 6, 1993, a clear, warm Tuesday. Seattle was still picking itself up from the Fourth of July. Richard Zapata drove in from Yakima, where he lived, and took his daughter to lunch at a Thai restaurant on Queen Anne. Afterward, they walked to Tower Records and then drove to the Seattle Art Museum.


Father and daughter got together once or twice a month. Zapata did not condone the lifestyle his daughter had chosen. At times he was revolted by it. And he worried for her. "She was very naive about the life she chose," he says.


About 3 p.m. they said goodbye at the bottom of the steps of her Rainier Valley rental. Zapata told his daughter he would call her in a few days. Mia did laundry, walked the dog. At least one roommate was home at the time.


Around 6:30 p.m., she found her way to the Winston Apartments on Capitol Hill. In the back was a makeshift rehearsal studio. She rehearsed with her boyfriend's band, Hells Smells, for a couple of hours. Her boyfriend, whose name was tainted early in the investigation before police cleared him, asked that his name not be printed here.


At about 8:30 p.m., Mia walked over to the Comet Tavern, a loud, friendly, thoroughly lived-in watering hole a block away, on East Pike Street. The tavern was a hangout for The Gits and their circle. On one carved-up booth in the back, Mia's name is still inscribed in the wood.


She sauntered in wearing the same clothes she'd worn all day: boots, rolled-up blue jeans, a hooded black sweatshirt with "Gits" on the back. She carried a Walkman, and one of her calves bore a tattoo of a chicken in honor of her childhood nickname, "Chicken legs."

It is believed she encountered her murderer shortly after 2:15 am. According to the television show Unsolved Mysteries, a man two blocks from the Comet Tavern heard a scream around 3 am. A woman found her body in the street at around 3:30 am near the intersection of 24th Avenue South and South Washington Street in the Central District neighborhood. Her body was in a Christ-like position, which gave rise to the belief that it was a cult killing. According to the medical examiner, if she had not been strangled she would have died from the internal injuries suffered from the beating.

Her slaying, which remained unsolved for years, sparked outrage and fear among family, friends and fans. An all-night candlelight vigil was held in Zapata's memory and friends, includuing Kurt Cobain and members of Pearl Jam, raised money to hire a private investigator to help find the killer and start a women's self-defense group.

In 2003 Florida fisherman Jesus Mezquia was linked to the crime when a DNA profile was extracted from saliva left on in a bite mark on Zapata's body. Mezquia was born in Cuba, lived in Seattle at the time of the murder, and his home address was about three blocks from where Zapata's body was found. He had a history of violence toward women, including domestic abuse and assault and battery. A report of indecent exposure had been filed against him in Seattle two weeks before Zapata's murder.

Mezquia was convicted of the murder and sentenced to 36 years in prison. The average sentence for his crime was 18 to 28 years, but due to the extreme violent nature of the crime the judge imposed a much longer sentence. The Washington Court of Appeals overturned the sentence in 2005 based on a U.S. Supreme Court ruling known as the Blakely decision, which said that “any factor that extends a sentence beyond its standard range must be proven by a jury or admitted by the defendant.”

In 2009 Mezquia was re-sentenced to 36 years.